Mira Miró
Isabel Clara Simó
When Antoni Miró paints, he focuses reality with powerful light, which, bouncing off him, goes straight to your heart and you feel guilty. Antoni Miró is the restlessness. Quite the opposite of the Impressionists - also very meritorious and aesthetically very nice - that reflect a woman, a snack, a landscape, under a layer of kindness, and you feel comfortable. They are calmness.
It is a vigorous painting and at the same time precise and delicate, where every detail becomes the protagonist.
He takes us by the hand, he plants us in front of his work and he says: "Look!" And that is when you understand that in art, technique does not matter, because it is only a means. Art is questioning the world and feeling part of it. It is commitment.
Antoni Miró is a Alcoyan, like the great Ovidi. The one painting and the other singing, wearing a red shirt, not necessarily made of an old curtain. But red, well red.
Some people believe that art, be it painting or literature, is adornment on a wall or on a shelf; that serves to pass the time, to say I have been in the Louvre, what a dizzy picture or I have read that book so entertaining. But this is not the case: art must make people think and must make them feel, otherwise they become a tool, like a pincers or a nail or any object of a hardware store - also very useful. If it only makes one think it is a treaty of philosophy or a wise allegory; if it only makes you feel like it's a soap opera or a tearful chrome.
What does Alcoy have that gives us such giants? It is difficult to answer, but the orography, centuries of isolation, the sense of work, the mountains so close that you feel you touch them with your hands, the bridges with their exquisite perfection, the people, the sudden laughter, the cadence of the public holidays, transparent air. Could be. Or it could be that we have had the immense luck of giving birth to both.
Once Picasso made a portrait of Gertrud Stein, and her brother, Léo Stein, exclaimed: "It doen’t look like!" Picasso's answer is an anthology: "Well, it will look like." What did the great Picasso mean? I wanted to say that reality is knowing how to look and it is not always the same as the one that is stuck in the retina. I wanted to say that art knows how to look and see things that some, or many, do not see. And that real reality is not that of the distracted eye but that of the artist. That is why Antoni Miró places us facing his numerous paintings, sometimes huge, and tells us: "Look at the real reality! Do not walk distracted ... Open your eyes ... Look at really".
The theory of perception warns us that if we suddenly stumble upon an absolutely unknown object not only we would not understand it but we would not even know how to look at it. And now, what is happening to us? So much information, so many reproductive devices and we do not see beyond the tip of the nose. And we continue trained, stubbornly, by the messages that come to us from power -the political power and the Ibex 35-, and we repeat like parrots the most absurd slogans. You feel: "Nobody will break Spain!" and you wonder what happens with Portugal, which became independent, or the much coveted Gibraltar. And the most powerful yet - the owners of the world - who preach an imminent and absurd war and do not say a word about the millions of Syrian refugees.
I likeAntoni Miró. His painting. His personal integrity. His fight.
And he is from Alcoi, for the record.
